Expect comments on politics, the oil & gas industry in general, life in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM), and a host of obviously and not so obviously related things.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

On Landry’s Significant Court Victory Yesterday… | The Hayride

On Landry’s Significant Court Victory Yesterday… | The Hayride: "So Edwards will go back to the drawing board and rewrite those contracts. And then Landry will reject them not on the basis of legal minutiae but as a matter of policy.
When he does, we’ll eventually get to the meat of the argument, which is going to be a very big deal soon – which is whether the governor of Louisiana has the unilateral power to hire lawyers to sue on behalf of the state, or whether anyone in state government holds a check on that power.
And this is virgin constitutional territory of sorts in Louisiana, and something of a constitutional crisis that Edwards has brought on. We’ve not had such a controversy previously, because (1) this is a level of gubernatorial overreach we’ve not seen even from some of the rather tyrannical governors we’ve had in the state’s past, and (2) because Landry is the first truly independent attorney general Louisiana has had in memory. Previous governors who decided to be sue-happy had the whole state government behind them; this one is trying to go it alone.
And that constitutional crisis is a hell of a lot more important than the petty question about hypothetical discrimination against gays and transsexuals in some obscure legal contracts. Which is why it’s such a disservice that the state’s mainstream media is spending all its time huffing and puffing about the latter."